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Ways and Ways to San JoseIn the Spirit of Edwin Markham and Henry Meade Bland by Al Young, California Poet Laureate |
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| SJSU Legacy of Poetry | ||
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He
drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in! --
Edwin Markham (“Outwitted”;
1899) These
endless ways to ways
and ways and ways and ways that start and end in the heart. Geometric
space-time floors us every time, so
fourth and fifth dimensions simply slap us around. Length
and width and height we grasp, but
mix it up with time and we go blind. “Go
no further,” we say. “I need to burn a disk.”
And
yet physicists, mathematicians, Buddhists,
nudists, poets painters, dancers, musicians --they
get it. Filmmakers get it, storytellers. Time
stretches and bends; life neither ends nor
begins at the where or what, nor at winning points we’d
like, so what to do? we
jail and kill and cut. So
how to link our wind-toxic, sky-blasted, fear-bloated
blues and the cannibal gobbledygook look,
scent and taste of our time-twisted views to
an American populist’s poetry of the used-to-be? Sticking
to the who, the why, the how long enough
to come back to the endangered now, we
come back home, we come back breathless. “Relativity,”
you whisper. Relatedness, I think. The
Man with the Hoe –
that’s all most ten-year-olds need to
hear. “So what’s the big deal? Is this poet for real?” Babies
reared on scrap-irony and bubble-wrap opinion suffer
from space-time paralysis, distortion; emotion-time
shines and groans on them alone. But
they didn’t come out of nowhere. Backed
all the way from Dream-Time to they
came out of us. To
eyeball a video of somebody tilling isn’t the same as
turning the poisoned soil -- the muscle and grit your
gristle and sweat – to keep your house from
falling down. To care where food
comes from, where your fruit comes from, where clothes
come from, your car, your gin, your medicine, your
loving kin, your friendly Zen. Exactly
how one great-grandmother’s great-grandmother snuggled
her babies and fought vigilantes of
a particular morning by a particular stream in
the flow and turbulence of timelessness tilts
the flight of one bright hummingbird right here we
neither understand nor know enough to care. When
Edwin Markham circled in instead of circling out, he
split one evil axis with his pen. Love was his ace. The
very day at the Henry
Meade Bland in space-time 1899 began
to teach the art of reading poems and stories (and
later the craft and path to making them) he
was handing out love-tickets. Without
readers, writers ride out a
lonesome trip. “I'm
the yellow of ripening grain,” Bland
the poet confided in Sierran Pan for
which Let’s
hear it for the spirit that suspends and sustains us. Let’s
hear it for years, for the weight of all the centuries, the
millennia it takes for us to get the feel again, again, again
and again the length of each chain, the
feel of each link that hooks us into each other. These
endless ways to ways
and ways and ways and ways that start and end in the heart. |
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This poem was written by Mr. Young for San José State University's 150th Anniversary and in honor of SJSU's Legacy of Poetry. It was published in Reed magazine, Issue 60, 2007. Mr. Young read it a Legacy of Poetry event on April 5, 2007 held in the King Library at SJSU. Printed here with author's permission. |
| This page last updated April 7, 2007 |
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